Posts by 45RPM

Yes! Exactly this. Thumbs up. I'd give you two, but Reg won't let me.

Actually, yes. These are socialist services. I realise that you might not like the word socialist, but I'm afraid I don't have the ability to redefine words for you. Personally, I have no problem with either Socialism or Capitalism - as long as they balance each other.

any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property

b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

So, I am going with definition b of socialism here. If the means of production (and distribution) is controlled by the state then it is by definition socialist. In my view this is a good thing for services which need to be protected so that they can be freely accessed by all (healthcare, education, libraries, unemployment benefit, policing, fire service, postal service etc) or where competition isn't possible (provision of water, gas or electricity to an area (because the infrastructure is common, and hence any change that you might think you are making to your provider is just an illusion - you may be changing a financial service, but the utility is still delivered in the same way), railway (and in this case you can't even change the financial arrangement).

On the other hand, public ownership of production and distribution where competition is desirable and particularly where the service doesn't need to be protected is insane. Go down that route and you end up making rubbish - like Trabants and Lada, Elektronikas and Agats. You end up with British Leyland and the NEB. Let's not go there again.

There is a grey area of course where it might desirable to have both socialist and capitalist services. For example publicly and privately provided education, public and private healthcare, public and private postal services.

Communism be damned! That’s a horrible shit show. But communism and socialism are two different animals. And neither is much like a society based on both capitalism and socialism - the welfare state. Which would be my preferred choice.

As for me being in charge - ah no. On that I suspect we can find common ground. I’d make a horrible job of it.

Well that’s certainly a popular trope for the far right press and blow hards, and I’m not going to claim that the communist parties of China, Russia and North Korea are innocent, but I’m not certain it will stand up even to cursory research. Ah yes…

Big points to your argument first. The low ball estimate says 15 million, but the high estimate says 55 mill. Communist Maos China (although I’m not sure I can see any truly socialist left wing policies - it looks a bit feudal monarchy to me)

Next Worst famine - China, but under the Chinese monarchy - definitely not left wing.

1906-1907, 25 million dead

Coming in to third place, with 19 million fatalities, the famine in the British Empire of the mid 19C century. Pretty sure that the British empire didn’t have socialist leanings at that time.

Bunch of 6 famines between the 14th and 18th centuries. All monarchies. Combined death toll - 50 million.

Russia famine, 1921, ditto my comments about communist China, 5 million dead. Then again, 1932-33, 7 million dead. That’s 12 million in total.

Chinese famine 1938, again not Communist, 10 million dead.

You can look it up for yourself. Here. I’ll start you off

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

But it doesn’t support your argument that left wing governments cause famines. What it does support is the argument that undemocratic governments act like venal little shits and only care for the well being of the ruling class.

Yeah. I’m a bit of a woolly liberal myself. I believe in strong capitalism paying for a socialist society (healthcare, schooling, social services, police, fire etc) through strong taxation.

Analogy. If, on a day that it's raining, 9 people were involved in a discussion on how long the rain will last and what to do on a wet day, would you want to include the one person who thinks it's a bright sunny day and who wants to go sunbathing (this despite the fact that they're soaking wet from the rain)? By your argument, they should have equal airtime despite the fact that a) the evidence is against them and b) there are 9 other people who might want their fare share of the discussion time (i.e. 90% of it).

Or maybe we have 100 people on a bus. 99 people want the bus to stop before it goes over the inconvenient cliff at the end of the lane, but one person is suicidal and wants to drive over the edge. Should their opinion be given equal weight (again, by your argument, yes they should.)

By my argument they should be given no more than their share - and maybe none at all, depending on how bonkers their view is. If, in the first analogy, another person came along claiming the sky was made of spaghetti and answered to the name fishy-mcfish-face then, yeah. No air-time. You'd grant them exact equivalence.

Incidentally, I don't need to "approve of the information". I might vehemently disagree with it. But it should at least be accurately reported and honest. For example, you might say that there's a really cold winter coming, and we should burn lots of oil to stay warm. If there was a really cold winter coming then I might disagree with you (I'd argue in favour of renewable energy sources to stay warm), but I couldn't accuse you of lying - so we'd be able to have a reasoned debate on what course of action we should take to heat our homes, weighing the pros and cons of both ideas. If one side bases their entire argument on a tissue of lies then it impossible to have a reasoned debate, to the detriment of democracy. So no. Exact equivalency is not a good thing.

Re: @45RPM

Re-reading what I wrote, I'm not surprised that it looked like "bashing their head against a brick wall and thinking it's(sic) a miracle cure for a head ache" to you. I used too many long words. Probably also explains why you split the word headache into two - reduces the syllable* count.

*whoops, did it again.

Nope - that's not what I said is it? I said that the population should be given the facts in a digestible manner. It is not unreasonable that the majority, who have not had the education necessary to interpret scientific (or mathematical, or other complex topic) information should attribute volume to validity. We saw this happen with Brexit - where whataboutism ensured that both sides were given equal weight. Result? Vast swaths of the population couldn't decide which way to vote, because they weren't given the information in a way they could use. We see this now with Brexit regret, and a majority in favour of rejoin - and an even larger majority wishing that we hadn't left in the first place, even if some of those aren't quite at the rejoin stage yet.

How much more democratic if they'd been presented this information honestly in the first place, with retractions for falsehoods prominently advertised when necessary.

Re: I am shocked ... shocked ...

This is a ridiculous story! The steering is working perfectly on all these cars. I have personally investigated this issue, and I discovered that the owners had let their subscription for steering functionality lapse. We at Tesla can't be expected to provide steering for free.

Love Elon.

Yup. Look here - CarWow Cybertruck Review

The bit you seek is at 13:20.

I don't think that its necessarily a bad idea - I had a VW back in the day (the day being 30 years ago) where the steering rack failed on the motorway. Which wasn't nice. But any technology can fail, and I'd have thought that it's easier to build redundancy into an electric / electronic system. But… Tesla do seem to be spectacularly bad at executing, and I'd like them to get the basics right before they start trying to innovate with safety.

Other than that, it's an interesting watch - and I love Matt Watson's infectious enthusiasm. He's like an eight year old with a new transformer toy. Which is probably why he likes the Cybertruck. Me? I'm grumpy and old, and I'll take good old fashioned solid build quality and dependability over pointless gadgets any day of the week.

Define efficiency. Efficiency of execution (and then what? efficiency of compute? memory usage? storage? Has its algorithmic efficiency been calculated)? Efficiency of maintenance? When I say efficiency, I abuse the term horribly - including, but not limited to, does it follow the SOLID principles? And, by the way, I'm also fine with breaking those principles - but you need to understand why they exist and why you need to break them before you do. Breaking it because you didn't understand it is as cardinal a sin as a developer releasing code that they don't understand.

Re: Why not

Well, maybe not that - but definitely I’d be interested to see if it can manage to move itself at all. Can the rotors spin independently? Would it be possible to fly on one rotor only? Can it hop with both rotors? So many questions. Worth playing with I think.

They had a proof of concept of some of the technologies then, but not much more. They didn’t even have hardware - they were using a bunch of Sage machines to emulate some Amiga concept functionality. Which doesn’t, by the way, detract from the fact that the Amiga was a great computer. But financial issues were the least of the reasons that it didn’t launch at the same time as Macintosh - let alone before it.

Of course - it very likely would. But would it have had drop down menus? Widgets in title bars? Desktop spanning multiple monitors? Well maybe, but perhaps it would have had something else instead. Maybe even something better* - who knows? But that’s not the history we’ve got.

Remember, Android was in development concurrently with iPhone. iPhone was released first - and took such innovative steps as being all screen and ditching the keyboard. At the time, Android was following the status quo and being developed, like WindowsCE, with a keyboard first design. iPhone comes out, no hardware keyboard becomes ‘just the way things are done’ - the rest is history.

It’s probably easier to imagine the alternative history for the phone - because that was still less than twenty years ago. Remembering back 40 years is somewhat harder, but nascent GUIs did exist before Mac - and wow, they were hard work! It’s very hard to imagine a GUI now without Apples innovations.

*if I could jump between realities, I’d bet that the ST wouldn’t have had a GUI and that the Amiga might have had a mechanism for pulling down the entire screen in a tile and revealing a table of options. In fact, I remember using a SunOS** based CAD package back in the day that worked something like that.

**no, not Solaris.

Re: Amiga had 3D capabilities ?

Starglider! I’ll raise a glass to that game. In fact, I was playing the night before last on my trusty Mac SE.

Re: Not convinced

“they take someone else's nearly great idea and polish it with easier UI and less stuff to worry about“

That’s pretty much the definition of innovation. So Apple have a great history of innovating. (Innovation - the practical implementation or improvement of an existing idea)

What they don’t have, I think we can all agree, is a history of inventing. (Inventing - coming up with something completely new, whether or not it works well or not)

Re: No Love For QuickDraw 3D?

Yup, the absence of any mention of QuickDraw 3D and the claim that the Amiga had 3D capabilities* betrays the fact that (whisper it) the author of this piece doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

And yes, the Mac doesn’t see much love when it comes to top tier games - but that doesn’t mean that it gets no love at all. The iPhone on the other hand is a gaming powerhouse. There is a lot of love for Metal out there - I don’t think that lack of experience with Metal is what will kill Vision Pro…

No. If Vision Pro dies it may be because it’s a silly idea. But, to put that in context, I thought that the PowerPC processor, PCI, USB, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the HomePod, the iMac, the MacMini, the Intel Mac and more besides were silly ideas for one reason or another too. History informs me that I was bang wrong about all those things. I quite liked the Newton and FireWire though. It might just be that I’m not the best judge on what technology succeeds and what dies - in fact, if I like it you should probably bet against it.

*it didn’t - just like those old Macs, if a developer wanted 3D they had to do it all themselves in assembly code. In fact, the Atari ST (so much weaker than the Amiga in nearly every other way) was reckoned to be the stronger platform for 3D back in the day - just because it’s CPU was very fractionally quicker. (8MHz 68000 for ST and original Mac vs. 7.15MHz 68000 for the Amiga)